Each new entry in the Dragon Age series is always transformative, so it's not uncommon for a fan to really love one of the entries but feel lukewarm about another. 2009's Origins played like a spiritual successor to 1998's Baldur's Gate, while its 2011 sequel took the series in a more third-person-action-game direction, and then 2014's Inquisition opted for gameplay that felt like a single-player MMO. If anything, the one constant to a Dragon Age game is that you can expect that each new game will be different from the last. During my first playthrough, Dragon Age: The Veilguard looked like it was not going to surpass my enjoyment of past games, existing as no more than a safe return to form for developer BioWare instead of a bold step forward for the franchise. But after dozens of hours with the game, I decided to try something different and now The Veilguard is inching its way into my good graces, something I didn't think was going to happen for my Inquisition-loving heart.

The Veilguard leans into real-time action-based combat to push the Dragon Age formula into feeling more akin to something like Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem, while utilizing a system of setups and detonations to pull off explosive combos. However, whereas Andromeda or Anthem have the benefit of being shooters--often leaving a comfortable distance between friend and foe to encourage strategic combinations of weapon attacks and powers--The Veilguard shortens that distance and leans into melee-focused combat by having its enemies swarm you and your party, pulling you and your allies into the thick of magical explosions and swinging swords.

Early on, this is easy enough to parse, but as the story goes on, the enemies get both more numerous and hardy. Your own attacks become grander and more explosive in response, leading to the screen filling with visual clutter. As a result, it can be frustratingly tricky to see the indicator for parries, and oftentimes dulls the combat to a repetitive slog of flinging magical explosions, a step down from the far more satisfyingly strategic combat of past BioWare games and other modern-day RPGs. I opted to play as a mage, my traditional go-to for Dragon Age, and was consistently bummed by how mindless and spammy the combat felt, forcing me to rely on the pause-and-play mechanic just to get by.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 remains my favorite of developer Treyarch's contributions to the long-running and sometimes formulaic shooter franchise, because it's the one that takes the most wild swings. It mixes traditional Call of Duty linear levels with a top-down, real-time-strategy-like experience that lets you move troops around the battlefield and then zoom down like a gunslinging ghost to possess any one of them and do the fighting yourself. It also logs your choices, your successes, and your failures, and adjusts its convoluted branching narrative to account for them.

The spirit of Black Ops 2 is alive in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and not just because it actually serves as a semi-prequel-sequel to that 12-year-old game. Black Ops 6 infuses the standard Call of Duty formula with level designs and mission ideas that challenge the usual Call of Duty framework in much the same way. It's not as brazen as Black Ops 2 was--that game was admirable for going all-out, but not all of its ideas were home runs in execution--and there's no branching narrative or major departure from Call of Duty gameplay in Black Ops 6. Instead, Treyarch works in creative but familiar design additions that break up and expand on its campaign, making for an experience that maintains the franchise's cinematic, high-yield explosiveness, while also providing numerous opportunities to feel like a super spy and super soldier.

There's a lot of story going on in Black Ops 6, but as is usually the case in the franchise, it's at once both pretty simple and weirdly complex. The gist is that, as part of a covert mission during Operation: Desert Storm, your CIA operative player character--a silent protagonist named Case--and his teammates Marshall and Harrow run into Russell Adler from Black Ops: Cold War. From Adler, you learn about The Pantheon, a paramilitary organization full of American ex-soldiers and others, operating secretly inside the CIA but with their own evil agenda. The rest of the game is about teaming up with Marshall, Adler, and Black Ops mainstay Frank Woods, recruiting a couple spies, and trying to figure out who The Pantheon is and how to stop them. It's all standard fare for a game like this.

A Quiet Place has quickly grown into one of the better horror franchises of the past decade. Three movies deep, the creature features have explored a fascinating world in which blind aliens use a highly keen sense of hearing to hunt humans desperate not to make a single peep. Translating that incredibly slow and silent story universe to a video game makes for a novel project, and I can see why A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has launched so quietly itself. It's a strange mission to assign players, but it's one I'm glad to have experienced--despite a host of issues.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a first-person stealth-horror game starring a cast of characters new to the series but similarly seeking to find safety from the swarm of aliens who have commandeered Earth by force. As Alex--an asthmatic college-aged woman with a boyfriend, a dad, and a range of other perpetually silent allies--players embark on a road trip that will test her ability to crouch-walk pretty much forever.

That design direction could easily make for a frustrating video game. In games that allow me to upgrade my crouched movement speed, I've always unlocked it as soon as I can--I like stealth games a lot and so I tend to want to improve that facet of such a game. So it's notable to me that The Road Ahead doesn't just demand you crouch-walk through almost every moment of its 7-to-10-hour story, but forces you to do it very slowly, usually barely pushing on the left stick, because the aliens in the game behave unpredictably like Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph and tend to hear even a crouched footstep performed at full speed.

Blumhouse Productions is arguably the biggest name in Hollywood horror today. The studio's ubiquitous logo appears before what feels like every other theatrically-released horror movie. It's clear the company has made the genre its focus, and I love that. It means there's always more to look forward to, even as results surely vary. With Fear The Spotlight, Blumhouse marks its debut in video games, which similarly excites me. Its games will also surely vary in quality, but this indie ghost story is a memorable debut, both for the burgeoning publisher and the pair of developers who built it together.

Fear The Spotlight stars Amy and Vivian, two high-school friends sneaking around school after-hours as soon as the game begins. Amy is dressed like a Hot Topic kid, while Vivian looks bookish. It gives the pair the air of an odd couple, but exploring their friendship while things go bump in the hallways helps introduce the story as they uncover a shady school history over the course of the game's initial three-to-four-hour campaign.

Fear The Spotlight uses a PS1-style aesthetic mixed with modern touches like an over-the-shoulder perspective. In many moments, the game also switches to point-and-click mechanics, mostly whenever the game's puzzles are being toyed with. It's both those puzzles and the game's scares that give Fear The Spotlight its gateway-horror vibe, and I enjoy it for that even if I'm no longer in the target audience. Though I love when games are especially terrifying, I also feel like younger or less-experienced horror fans deserve entertaining scares they can stomach. Not every game should be Outlast or Amnesia on the spooky scale.

Sonic X Shadow Generations is two games: a remaster of a game from 2011 and a brand-new game for 2024. And yet, both games feel oddly similar, building most of their levels on the backbone of Sonic games from the 2000s. In that respect, they carry forward some of the shortcomings of those Sonic games, like unnecessary extra mechanics and a bland story, but at the same time, they do well what those games excelled at: delivering fun platforming gauntlets accompanied by memorable music and an exhilarating sense of speed.

If you've already played Sonic Generations, you know what you're getting with the first half of this package. Sonic's adventure remains largely unchanged--most notably, the visuals are better, since this is a remaster--seeing the blue hedgehog team up with his past self to speed through a collection of levels inspired by his many previous adventures. Each level has two acts--the first sees past Sonic race through 2D levels while the second features modern-day Sonic running through the same space but now in 3D. Past Sonic handles much like he did in the original games back in the '90s, while modern Sonic utilizes the mechanics added to the series during the 2000s, like the homing attack and dash. The whole collection is a celebration of Sonic's career up to 2011.

In 2024, Sonic Generations feels outdated. While the old-school Sonic levels remain a timeless look back at the hedgehog's origins, the second half no longer feels like an accurate presentation of modern-day Sonic, as the gameplay of the franchise has continued to transform over the past decade. This doesn't outright ruin the original experience, though it does leave the conclusion of Sonic Generations feeling lacking, as if the trip through Sonic's greatest hits abruptly stops partway through. It leaves the three-hour experience feeling rushed in a way it didn't back in 2011.